Thursday, October 18, 2012

Spreadsheets are very powerful tools. They were the main reason the PC revolution got started in the first place. While most people have forgotten Visicalc or Lotus 123, their successor Excel -- or even Google Docs -- is now so powerful that some businesses run their entire operations on spreadsheets.

But is it wise to do keep your books on a spreadsheet? I would argue that it's not and for the following reasons:

1. Getting the right functionality is hard

Out of the box, a spreadsheet will not provide the functionality you need to keep track of revenue, expenses, VAT, bank accounts etc... It can be done but it does require some work. You can find ready-made spreadsheets that will provide some of that functionality (and as a matter of fact we do provide such a template to our clients) but the functionality will never be as good as what a dedicated bookkeeping package can offer.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Kashflow is a great online bookkeping package that we recommend to our clients because of its simplicity and powerful features. Earlier this month Kashflow released new Dropbox integration. It extends the document management functionality that was limited to storing receipt copies up until now. With this new integration, you can now store documents in any part of the package, be it bank statements, contracts, payslips or whatever you see fit. While the extended functionality is welcome, you need to think carefully about replacing the existing receipt storage functionality on Amazon with the new one on Dropbox.

Fortunately you have the option to enable the new functionality while keeping the old behaviour just for receipts. Here are the pros and cons of turning the new functionality on for receipts:

Sunday, October 24, 2010

As more of the IT world moves onto the Web, accounting software is following that trend. However, while some segments of the software market have moved happily into the Cloud, there is still some resistance when it comes to putting your financials on the web.

Having your data hosted somewhere else has always been controversial, especially when it comes to sensitive data. Some countries like Switzerland even have laws that make it very difficult to host client data outside your premises (not that it has protected any of those American UBS clients). But that controversy has gone less virulent recently: it’s now common practice, even amongst banks which tend to be very conservative, to host their email or CRM at third party providers. And even the most reticent financial institutions have no qualms about using Bloomberg, even to transact.

As bandwidth becomes ubiquitous and as browsers become more and more powerful, there is an increasing incentive to use hosted service providers. That’s great news because the benefits of using a SaaS (Software as a service) model are numerous, especially if the software is browser based. Here is a quick rundown of why it’s a good idea:

There is no upfront cost. Most SaaS providers charge on a per month/per user basis. This is great for start-ups and SMEs since no capital is tied up, especially now when funding is so hard to secure.

If the software is browser based, as most new modern platforms, it’s a guarantee that it will work with most OSes and platforms. You don’t have to be on this version of Windows or have that version of Excel for the product to work. And conflicts with other pieces of software are less prone to happen since interfaces are built at the server level through the SOAP or REST protocols